Factors influencing school connectedness: Chinese adolescents’ perspectives

This study explored the concept of school connectedness and the factors that may influence its development with a sample of Chinese adolescents. Six focus groups involving 52 high school students were conducted using a set of predetermined discussion topics. Results indicated that the students fully understood the notion of school connectedness and could identify a number of key influences affecting its development. These factors could be grouped under several domains including teacher care, peer relations, broader school relationships, school disciplinary policies and practices, activities within the school’s guidance and counseling program, and opportunities for talent development. The students were also able to suggest practical strategies that schools might introduce to enhance and strengthen students’ acquisition of connectedness to school. The implications from the findings are discussed with particular reference to implementing comprehensive school guidance and counseling program in Hong Kong.     

Students’ images of two-variable functions and their graphs

This paper presents a conceptual analysis for students’ images of graphs and their extension to graphs of two-variable functions. We use the conceptual analysis, based on quantitative and covariational reasoning, to construct a hypothetical learning trajectory (HLT) for how students might generalize their understanding of graphs of one-variable functions to graphs of two-variable functions. To evaluate the viability of this learning trajectory, we use data from two teaching experiments based on tasks intended to support development of the schemes in the HLT. We focus on the schemes that two students developed in these teaching experiments and discuss their relationship to the original HLT. We close by considering the role of covariational reasoning in generalization, consider other ways in which students might come to conceptualize graphs of two-variable functions, and discuss implications for instruction.     

Managing indigenous knowledge for sustainable agricultural development in developing countries: Knowledge management approaches in the social context

This paper is based on a PhD study (Lwoga, 2009) that sought to assess the application of knowledge management (KM) approaches in managing indigenous knowledge (IK) for sustainable agricultural practices in developing countries, with a specific focus on Tanzania. This study used a mixed-research method which was conducted in six districts of Tanzania. Non-participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and focus groups were used to collect primary data from small-scale farmers in the selected districts. A total of 181 farmers participated in the semi-structured interviews, where the respondents ranged between 27 and 37 per district. Twelve focus group discussions were conducted in the selected districts. The study revealed that IK was acquired and shared within a small, weak and spontaneous network, and thus knowledge loss was prevalent in the surveyed communities. There were distinct variations in the acquisition of agricultural IK both in different locations and between genders. Information and communication technologies (ICT), culture, trust, and status influenced the sharing and distribution of IK in the surveyed communities. The research findings showed that KM models can be used to manage and integrate IK with other knowledge systems, taking the differences into account (for example, gender, location, culture, infrastructure). The paper concludes with recommendations for the application of KM approaches for the management of IK and its integration with other knowledge systems for agricultural development in developing countries, including Tanzania.     

Speaking Like a State: Listening to Benjamin Franklin in Times of Terror

This essay reconstitutes Benjamin Franklin's characteristic political style as a particular inflection of liberal irony, arguing for a way of speaking today that checks arrogance with humility and attempting to unlock the psychosocial economy of political enjoyment implicit in this rhetoric. To do so, the essay traverses four bodies of discourse (including recent political thinking about civic character, Franklin's oratory in 1787 at the constitutional convention, passages from his letters, and an excerpt from his autobiography) in order to extract strategies for managing situations in which democracy becomes prone to the enjoyments of terror and tyranny.     

Between the Structural and the Personal: Situated Sense-Makings of “Race” This research was supported by a grant from the MOSAIC Multicultural Center at San Jose State University.

Using a critical intercultural communication perspective and cultural studies interviewing method, this study traces individuals’ subjective sense-makings of diversity through the trope of “race.” Such sense-makings represent the key (and taken-for-granted) locus of the structural and personal where social actors live out the constructions of diversity and race in deeply felt ways. Our study reveals how individuals articulate and understand race via raceless diversity encodings (whereby race is seemingly stripped of its power inequalities, and all racial/ethnic groups are made equal) and racial pivoting (whereby participants both discursively pull away from and move toward race to suit their individual experiences).     

Governing Sounds: Hate,Race, and Responsibility in Post-Apartheid Broadcasting

The bounds of permissible hate in post-apartheid broadcasting in South Africa have been shaped by the state's withdrawal from certain regulatory processes, as well as the emerging regulation by the Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa (BCCSA). The BCCSA—established, financed, and operated by South Africa's broadcasting industry—filled the regulatory void not just by governing post-apartheid hate; the BCCSA has sought to govern the racial constructs upon which hate depends. With the state's withdrawal, BCCSA officials have configured hate and race in neoliberal ways, shifting responsibility for post-apartheid hate away from apartheid's beneficiaries and toward those apartheid was intended to subjugate.     

Using a Field Trip Inventory to Determine If Listening to Elementary School Students' Conversations,While on a Zoo Field Trip,Enhances Preservice Teachers' Abilities to Plan Zoo Field Trips

This study investigated whether listening to spontaneous conversations of elementary students and their teachers/chaperones, while they were visiting a zoo, affected preservice elementary teachers' conceptions about planning a field trip to the zoo. One hundred five preservice elementary teachers designed field trips prior to and after listening to students' conversations during a field trip to the zoo. In order to analyze the preservice teachers' field trip designs, we conducted a review of the literature on field trips to develop the field trip inventory (FTI). The FTI focussed on three major components of field trips: cognitive, procedural, and social. Cognitive components were subdivided into pre-visit, during-visit, and post-visit activities and problem-solving. Procedural components included information about the informal science education facility (the zoo) and the zoo staff and included advanced organizers. Social components on student groups, fun, control during the zoo visit, and control of student learning. The results of the investigation showed that (a) the dominant topic in conversations among elementary school groups at the zoo was management, (b) procedural components were mentioned least often, (c) preservice teachers described during-visit activities more often than any other characteristic central to field trip design, (d) seven of the nine characteristics listed in the FTI were noted more frequently in the preservice teachers' field trip designs after they listened to students' conversations at the zoo, and (e) preservice teachers thought that students were not learning and that planning was important.     

Children's conceptions of the earth,sun and moon

Understanding of the Earth/Sun/Moon system represents a major cultural nexus in the history of ideas as well as being an important conceptual area in junior science teaching. The situation is one in which the objects in question can be observed but do not lend themselves to hands‐on experience in the case of the Sun and Moon or to obvious meaningful experience of the system in the case of the Earth.

Children from 9 to 12 years of age were questioned using a clinical interview technique and stimulus materials, about the shape, size and motion of the Earth, Sun and Moon. A number of alternative views appear to be held. The use of a similar procedure with a group of children would seem to offer a powerful teaching methodology in which both teacher and students gain from the dialectic learning situation that is developed by this technique ‐ apart from providing insights concerning children's understanding.